


Nobody's Idea of a Vacation

by scioscribe



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 22:16:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16049663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Ross grinned.  “As always, you’ve come to the right place.  I’m guessing your overlap on ‘obviously non-Wakandan people’ and ‘people you sort of trust’ and ‘people who aren’t Captain America’ is pretty slim, but I’m always happy for a vacation.”





	Nobody's Idea of a Vacation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



“Does your government mind how often you disappear?” Nakia said.

Ross wouldn’t leave his face alone.  Shuri had given him a net-mask made of vibranium filaments: it projected an opaque light field of slightly altered features, making him completely unrecognizable, and after he had gotten through enthusing over it, he had been unable to stop touching it.  The technology was a work-in-progress and any interruption made it flicker like the surface of a pond.  Ross couldn’t seem to get enough of poking himself and causing unnerving distortions: a missing eyelid, a shortened lip, a sudden glimpse of his actual jawline.

He turned to her, his mask reactivating and restoring him to total unfamiliarity, making a stranger out of him.  “No.  They think I’m spying on you.”

“Are you?”  She asked it lightly—she wanted to know the answer but knew she would be a fool to believe the one she wanted to hear.  T’Challa had asked her if she was sure she and Shuri knew what they were doing, entrusting Ross with unreleased tech and bringing him into the occasional operation.  An American agent, neither so guileless nor so hapless as he could pretend.  A foreign spy with connections to Wakanda’s inner circles.

(“Don’t I always know what I’m doing?” she’d said.

“I hope not,” T’Challa had said.  His smile was irresistible.  “I would feel even more unequal to you if you did.  And if Shuri always knew—Bast, what a terror she would be.”  He had taken her hand briefly in his.  “You do not trust easily.”

No.  She had seen too much for that.

“I like to think you only give your affection wisely,” he said.  “For reasons of vanity, no doubt.  But I will put my faith where you put yours, Nakia.”)

She waited for Ross to repeat her question, incredulously—a tactic she knew herself, one to buy time—but he didn’t bother with feigned outrage or a lengthy list of reasons she should believe him.  He just said, “No, actually,” and went back to fidgeting with his mask.

“Shuri won’t like it if you break her prototype.”

“I’m not going to _break_ it, I’m just trying to figure out how it works.”

“You won’t.”

“Your confidence is inspiring,” he said dryly.  Nakia laughed.  The mask smiled, its sensors reading the shape of Ross’s own expression underneath.  “All right.  I get it.  I break it, I buy it, and I can’t afford to buy it.  What are we doing, what’s the game plan?”

“You’re a buyer shopping for illicit Wakandan tech, things off even the margins of the approved list.”  The approved list had been carefully, painstakingly curated by T’Challa, Shuri, and the Tribal Council, each item triple-vetted for its potential to help and harm.  Agricultural equipment, labor-saving devices, sporting goods, children’s toys.  They anticipated and allowed for a certain amount of runoff—their scientists were too eager for collaboration, their idealists too infatuated with the new efforts.  You could never count on ruling a whole country; if you could, it would not be worth ruling.  But some rules remained the same.  No black-market or even open-market vibranium, no weapons, no communications tech that could be enlisted into surveillance.  Half the things they had given Ross were hardline forbidden.  The mask, obviously, was one.

But he kept none of it.  At the end of each visit, he left Wakanda only with what he’d had on him at his arrival.  Maybe he carried back the knowledge, but without vibranium, without schematics, without Shuri, what was that incomplete understanding worth?

If he had been betraying their trust all along—or striving to betray it—he was either the greatest spy the world had ever known or the worst.  Nakia simply didn’t think either was very likely.

“So I’m in the market for vibranium,” Ross said.  “This feels familiar.”

Nakia shook her head.  “Too many people know about vibranium.  Any sellers will be used to fielding offers for it—they won’t open up to you at all about supply lines or sources, not when they can just sell to the next person in line, someone less chatty.  No, you’re in the market for hardware, software, cameras, phones, the kind of daily-use tech that could make you a fortune once some American company started churning out knock-offs.”

“You want to pull in the seller tonight or leave him on the string for a while and see where he goes?”

“I’m in no hurry.”  For once this was true.  She no longer had to move quickly enough, and do enough, to make up for the inaction of her whole country.  It was good from time to time to be still, to let herself take a less fraught mission, one that wouldn’t give her nightmares afterwards.

Maybe Ross came to Wakanda because he wanted the same thing.  Nakia wondered what gave him more trouble—bearing witness or bearing guilt.  There was no way to be a spy without having done things you would be ashamed of.

“Great.  Shuri said the mask has a built-in radio—well, she said radio is an oversimplified term for it—and you could talk to me, so just let me know if I need to bail out, bob and weave, whatever.”

“Bob and weave?”

He held up his hands in loose fists and popped one forward.  “Like a boxer.  You don’t have boxing?”

Nakia wrinkled her nose.  “Not if it looks like that.  We have _fighting_.”

“Ouch.  Eh, I’m a few years past my prime when it comes to boxing or fighting or whatever you want to call it, but I’m great at using metaphors.  Bobbing and weaving—I mean like if you need me to change directions in my story, adjust whatever impression I’m making.”

“And if I want you to really badly punch someone in the face?”

“Your wish is my command.  I feel like we’re underrating me here—it’s not like I can’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag.”

“Prove it to me another night,” Nakia said.  “Right now I’m in the mood for smooth.”

“Are you ever not?”

“Sometimes.  Depending on how angry I am and how much I think that anger will cost me or whoever it is I’m trying to help.”

“Stolen iPods isn’t exactly the kind of thing to inspire rage.”

“You know Shuri,” Nakia pointed out.  “We aren’t exactly talking about iPods.”

“See, you don’t know boxing but you do know iPods.  Culturally, I never know what page we’re on.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Nakia said.  “And iPods have better marketing.”

*

She hadn’t given him anything specific to ask for because it was better for his questions to be vague, for them to have a little bit of the fizz of Ross’s own curiosity buoying them up.  They just borrowed a Talon and flew to Mutare.

“Zimbabwe—what’s the main language, Shona?  My Shona’s not any better than my Xhosa.  Worse, actually.  We counting on people to speak English?”

“In the grand tradition of your people, yes.  But they will—or at least it won’t be a problem for you to find someone who can.  Besides, you’re supposed to be some kind of corporate middleman, just the tiniest bit corrupt.  If you were good enough and prepared enough to know the language—if you were good enough and prepared enough to even know what the language might be—you’d put them on edge.  I want a clueless American.”

Ross grinned.  “As always, you’ve come to the right place.  I’m guessing your overlap on ‘obviously non-Wakandan people’ and ‘people you sort of trust’ and ‘people who aren’t Captain America’ is pretty slim, but I’m always happy for a vacation.”

“Ah, so you’re helping me because we still haven’t started letting in tourists.”

“Exactly,” Ross said.  “The day you do, I’m just going to show up with a beach towel and the new Stephen King and leave you to make do with Rogers.  Who, by the way, is not the greatest liar in the world, so you’re going to miss me.”

“It took us thousands of years to let the rest of the world even know what we are capable of,” Nakia said.  "I think opening up the beaches all… willy-nilly might take longer than the rest of your career.”

“Here’s hoping,” Ross said.

*

Nakia fit into the Mutare casino well enough—they would not be able to place her accent, which even after all these years of travel was irreducibly Wakandan, its tones so rarely heard, but in a hotel full of travelers, that was no problem.  Ross stood out far more—not the only white man on the floor, but worth noticing, especially with how he had dressed, in a suit too ill-fitting to be the personally tailored garb of a high-roller and too deliberately chosen to be the casualwear of someone on holiday.  He was out of place, but he was right in the middle of the role she wanted for him.  Corporate, hurried, disinterested in his surroundings.  Careless.

As he’d said, he wasn’t a bad liar.

“I heard you’re someone I might want to talk to,” Ross said.

He was talking to a reed-thin man with a lantern jaw—it was a distinctive enough face that Nakia thought she would have remembered if she’d seen it before.  That was at least some relief.  She had run into those surprises before, and the bitterness of them never went away.  T’Challa returned over and over again to what his father had done in Oakland, not grasping it—he was too forgiving to nurse such rage at an ally, let alone a brother, when he could hardly even have it for his enemies.  But Nakia understood.  Part of the drive for justice was wanting to see everything in its proper place, and that wasn’t a desire that easily met a friend’s betrayal.

Another reason she should not be queen.

Though she had to admit, T’Challa had… made persuasive arguments lately.  She smiled, covering the slight curve of her mouth with the rim of her wineglass.  She watched Ross and his contact.

“I have a good line of talk,” the man said.  “Of course, it depends on what you want me to say.”

“I’m Evan,” Ross said, extending his hand.

“Chatunga.”

“That’s a Shona name,” Nakia murmured, her lips barely moving.  Shuri’s microphones were so sensitive that all they needed was a breath.  “He might be a local, then.”

“Well, Chatunga,” Ross said, “I thought we could talk about, um, talk.  Chat.  Tweets.  Texts.  Instagram.  Whatever your kids are up to that you don’t understand but somebody else is making a million dollars a second off of.  You have kids?  You know what, doesn’t matter, you get the gist.  If you can put it on a phone—or if it’s the next phone, period—I know someone who might be interested.”

“Who gave you my name?”

“You did.  Just now.”

Chatunga smiled.  “Cute, very cute.  Who told you to look for me?  Who pointed me out?”

“Tell him Bruce sent you,” Nakia said.  It was a code name she had heard tossed around—there was no one Bruce, but it was slang for anyone tapped into the market for underground technology.  It worked as an informal password.  “It’s Bruce as in Bruce Wayne, Batman.  High tech and in the shadows.  Someone in the underworld’s been watching too many movies.”

“Bruce sent me,” Ross said.  He had to talk over her explanation a little to lessen the pause, but she trusted he was hearing her.  “He didn’t say your name was Chatunga though.  Something else.  But the description was pretty distinctive.”

Chatunga’s bearing eased a little.  Good.  “I think we can do business.  You like the newcomers, right?”

“Stepped out from behind the curtain,” Ross said, nodding.  “I do.  I think there’s a lot of money there.”

“Most people chase vibranium.”

“My employer succeeds because they think a little further than most people.  It’s not about the competition, it’s about seeing the opportunities other companies don’t.”

That went on a little while longer as Chatunga finished his drink, and then he told Ross to wait there while he sorted out somewhere for them to talk a little more privately.  Ross nodded, glancing at his watch like he was weighing how long of a delay he could tolerate.  When Chatunga was gone, he raised his hand to his mouth like he was covering a cough and said, “How did I do?  I read a copy of _Wired_ on the plane to really sell the angle.”

She bit back a laugh.  “It worked.  You sound smug.”

“I _am_ smug.”

“And that’s a very long cough you’re faking.  Hands away from your face.”

“Right, I know, or else I’ll face the wrath of Shuri.”

“And blow your cover.”

“Yeah, that’s a secondary concern.”  From this distance, she couldn’t even see his lips move.  A little impressive.

“Disappointing Shuri is a little like—oh, shit.”  She put her drink down on the balcony railing.  “Bail out.  Turn and walk away, don’t bother with making an excuse, just get out of there.”

Ross started tracking towards the exit immediately, his stride easy, not noticeably hurried.  “What’s wrong?”

“He’s coming back your way with company.”

“Someone you know?”

“More or less.”  Someone _he_ knew, actually, and Shuri’s mask didn’t distort his voice.  Nakia was hardly surprised that one of Ross’s CIA colleagues had a hand out to catch any secrets Wakanda might drop—she wasn’t shocked, just worried about what this might mean for him if she couldn’t get him out in time.  She had to think of a dozen reasons and outcomes all at once.  Another CIA agent here could mean too many things: that they had no idea where Ross was and it was pure coincidence, that they wanted Wakandan intel and weren’t getting it from him and no longer trusted him enough to let him know their own plans, that her sting had run into one targeting him, that he had not anticipated her knowing any American agents by sight and _he_ had orchestrated all this.

Not that last one.  Maybe her reasons for being sure of that weren’t good enough, but she was sure of it nonetheless.

She’d lost sight of him around the corner, headed for the doors herself, but he must have looked back.  “Ah.  One of mine.  Got it.”

“Don’t get yourself in trouble,” Nakia said.  “And don’t slow down.”

“I live for trouble.”

“You live for—”  She searched her memory for what he’d mentioned liking, what she’d seen him enjoy.  “Honey Nut Cheerios and bringing Shuri comic books and Roombas and those little plastic figurines with the big eyes.”  She still didn’t understand why the Roombas had been involved, since Shuri could have easily made her own, but they were currently roaming the palace in a heavily-modified form, and Shuri talked to them like they were pets.  “You don’t even like trouble.”

“Wouldn’t know it from what I do for a living though, would you?”

Or from what he did for fun, assuming this counted.  She spotted a third man by the door, dressed like Ross, unobtrusive in shades of gray and a navy tie, his bearing not relaxed enough.  “You’re bottled up, you’ll have to turn around.  They’ve got someone at the door.”

“Shit.  What’s my priority here, them not getting hold of the mask?”

They were still speaking in whispers, but her voice got a little louder as she said, “Your priority is them not getting hold of _you_.”

She should have seen this coming.  She should never have gotten him involved.  They had Barnes on hand, didn’t they?  He would have done it, if she'd really needed someone white to play her buyer.

“I’m playing the hand I’ve got,” Ross said, and then Nakia saw him turn around, an amiable smile painting itself across his face.  “You ever heard of coming on a little strong?”

The CIA agent blinked.  What was his name?  She’d been over their intelligence databases dozens of times, she had as much clearance as nearly anyone in Wakanda, but she couldn’t remember what name this one had been tagged with—not that it probably mattered.  Ross was Ross, they had dug into his background enough to establish that, but half the CIA men and women in their files were Smith or Jones.  She decided this one looked more like a Jones.

And Jones knew Ross’s voice, at least a little.  Enough for some instinct to alert him that it was coming from the wrong face.

“Where are you going?” Jones said.  “You come here for a deal and now all of a sudden you’ve got somewhere else to be?  That’s interesting.”

Bast.  She knew why Ross had stopped—if they had the advantage, he was safer on the casino floor than he would be out in some alleyway—but that didn’t mean she liked it.  She pressed a communications strip by her ear.  “Shuri?  I could use a distraction.”

Shuri was there immediately.  “What level of distraction are we talking about?  Chaos, mayhem, or just a general ‘ah, look over there!’ kind of thing?”

“All three.  Ross’s employers have decided to keep us company.  I think they’d be a little more interested than we’d like in how he came to be here with priceless Wakandan tech on his face.”

“When am I going to be done getting him out of these messes of his?” Shuri said, but since Shuri was the only person Nakia knew who genuinely did live for trouble, she sounded more enthused than anything else.  “Honestly, Nakia, his best luck ever was running into us, bullet or no bullet.  There, that should work.  You might want to cover your ears.”

“Shuri’s got you,” Nakia said to Ross.

Clear as day, loud as anything, he said, “Never doubted it for a second,” and Jones said, “What?  Who are you talking to?” and reached for him—

And then every slot machine on the casino floor began churning out coins in waterfalls, their sirens wailing in pleased distress.  Bless Shuri.

Nakia stamped her foot, summoning the hoverbike to her.  People noticed, of course, they could hardly not, but most of them were too busy with their sudden riches.  She zoomed the bike down the stairs and up to Ross, who’d gotten several feet closer to the door; he swung up behind her without missing a beat.  In the next moment his whole body had tightened against hers, a sudden convulsive squeeze, and then they were out the doors, picking up speed.  Lost on the streets of Mutare.  She slowed and let the wheels come down, making their breakout into nothing more than a casual ride.  A casual ride with a woman in a cocktail gown and a man wrapped around her like a belt, sure, but better than something breakneck.

“Well,” Ross said, Shuri’s tech making him audible even over the roar of the bike’s engines, “now we know some of the people involved in your black market.”  His voice was strained.

“Now we do.”

“I didn’t know.”

“That much was obvious,” Nakia said.  “Were they after you?  Tailing you?”

“I don’t think so.  Subtlety isn’t actually that guy’s strong suit.”  His hand spasmed against her hip.  “Good aim, though,” he added lightly.

Dammit.

*

“Why?” Shuri said.  “Every time, why?”

“It’s not every time,” Ross said, wincing as she prodded at his wounded side.  “It’s twice.”

“Twice is two times too many.  I’m going to have to start building bulletproof armor into your jackets.  Now hold still.”

Nakia had changed out of her gown as soon as they had arrived back at Shuri’s lab—the bloodstain Ross had left on it would come out with good laundering, but from the way her stomach turned when she looked at it, she didn’t know that she wanted to keep it.  She didn’t have that many occasions to wear Western evening-wear anyway—she could keep a piece of it that didn’t remind her of a friend bleeding out against her back.

Ross looked up at her.  “Hey, this isn’t your fault.”

“I involved you,” Nakia said.

“I like being involved.  Besides, getting shot’s nothing when we’ve got Doogie Howser here— _ow_!”

“I am much more impressive than Doogie Howser,” Shuri said.  “Mind your manners.”  She ran another scanner over him and frowned at it.  “At least you didn’t say Wesley Crusher.”

“Did someone give you a list of teenage geniuses in pop culture?”

“Buzzfeed.  Here, let me take that off your face.”  She ran one fingertip across his hairline and her hand came away with what looked like strings of silvery spiderweb hanging from it; Ross was Ross again, reassuringly solid if even paler than usual from the loss of blood.  Nakia knew it was nothing—Shuri had sighed in relief at getting a look at the wound—but it didn’t change the fact that it was the second time he had gotten shot in some way on her behalf.

He met her eyes again.  “Nakia, I like being here.”

“On your vacation.”

“Oh, it’s your vacation?” Shuri said absently.  Her attention was now completely off them as she bent over the examination table, tool in hand.  “We should go to the mountains—they’re really very beautiful when you’re not running for your life through them, you’ll like it.”

She had given him a few painkiller shots around the affected area, but Ross still winced as Shuri’s magnetic tool prodded gently against the surface of the wound.  Shuri had explained it to them—something about it diffusing the bullet into a more malleable string of particles and extracting it without causing any more damage—but Nakia hadn’t been able to follow it.  She could, however, follow with a mingled sense of nausea and awe as a dense, dark gray cloud gathered around the glowing end of the extractor and was pulled out of Ross’s body.  Slowly, stretchily.

“It looks like really disgusting taffy,” Ross said.  “Anyway, see, no harm done.  And you were spared the sight of me—”

“Dying?”

“Bobbing and weaving.  Look, I—I like coming here.  I like having… this.”  He waved one hand around at her, Shuri, the lab.  “You guys.  Wakanda’s… Wakanda’s important.  You’re changing the world, and I don’t want anyone on my side to mess that up for you just because we don’t always want the world to get changed.  Besides, I’m feeling less cynical lately.  It’s good to help out a friend.”

“And when it means you wind up running from your own coworkers?  Getting shot by them?”

“Eh, that guy’s an asshole, I heard he kissed someone else’s wife at the last Christmas party.  But yeah.  Even when it means I wind up running from my own side and getting shot by them.  That’s nothing new.  The CIA always winds up playing both ends against the middle, intentionally or not.”

“I don’t see the problem,” Shuri said crisply, putting a biological mender up against him and brushing it down the bullet-hole in smooth, even strokes.  “If he goes to prison, or if they try to execute him—”

“Wow, going straight to execution, huh?”

“—then we’ll break him out.”

Ross laughed and then swore.  “Don’t joke, that seriously hurt.”

“I’m not joking.”  Shuri capped the mender and stepped away, stripping off her gloves.  She went to the sink to wash her hands.  “Nakia’s the best at breaking people out of prison.  Actually, I’m making an international list—well, you probably don’t want to know that.  What you don’t know, you can’t feel guilty for not telling.”

“I don’t really feel guilty,” Ross said, and he sounded a little curious about it.  He reached up and tapped the foot of one of Shuri’s Funko Pops, and it seemed to remind him of something.  “But yeah, under no circumstances should you ever complete that sentence around me, just in case.  How are the Roombas, by the way?”

Shuri perked up.  “You have to see them!  I’ll give you one to take back, you’ll love it.  They don’t just clean any more, they categorize small items and map their locations.  You can ask them where your keys are and they’ll tell you.  And I’m working on giving them a sense of decorum—privacy, you know, when to disturb and not to disturb, when to release knockout gas.  They’re the best.”

Watching the two of them, Nakia thought, _I know what I’m doing_ , and she felt the bone-deep certainty of that.  They all knew what they were doing.  And Shuri was right, the mountains really were beautiful this time of year, when you were among friends and free of terror.  She could ask T’Challa to accompany them.  It would be a holiday of sorts.  None of them tourists, so no violation of the official writ of law—no tourists, just three locals and a guest.


End file.
